OBVIOUSLY NOT A TIME FOR CONSIDERED DEBATE

LAST week I was advocating the withdrawal of the White House correspondents from the “briefings” given by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, both as a gesture of disrespect for the enemy, and as a matter of good journalistic practice. I said it is simply wrong to regard what is happening there as being in the democratic tradition, it is factually inaccurate to see it like that: simply to be in that room is bad journalism.

Indeed, in this matter it is Trump who is being honest, describing journalists as the enemy, while they carry on with the delusion that their job is to be “objective”, to be “holding him to account”. Yeah, that’s going well. Not that I really expect the correspondents to walk away, because basically they just love being there, and it would probably break their hearts to give up their “hard pass” — but it is still important to point out that as long as they are there, they are part of the problem.

Then the Trumper vented his hatred of Jim Acosta and CNN at his “press conference”, and Sanders endorsed a video of the event which was shown to be doctored, and you’d think that this might get a few of them out of the briefing room next time. But again, you’d probably be wrong.

There was some criticism of the way the fracas started, from some highly respected teachers of American journalism — criticism of Acosta.

“If he had phrased his question in a more neutral tone, he likely would have had more information for his audience to digest,” they wrote on the prestigious Poynter Institute website.

That is a good one. However, Acosta did it, he ended up giving his audience so much information to digest, they might still be studying it in 10 years’ time, wondering if this was the moment when America officially changed from democracy to… whatever is coming.

Ah, but if Acosta had done it the right way, according to the folks at the Poynter Institute, he would have “avoided becoming bigger than the event he was covering”.

They love that stuff, they would probably have told Hemingway that he was handy enough at the “colour writing”, but could he possibly stop himself becoming bigger than the event he was covering? — “It’s not about you, Ernest!”

Indeed, there wouldn’t have been much of an event at all without Acosta’s intervention, just the usual routine of reporters behaving “responsibly” and getting abused in return. And even after the altercation with the microphone, the “responsible” reporters just went back to the boring, stupid questions they had prepared earlier. They were becoming smaller than the event they were covering.

But Poynter don’t mind that, nor would they endorse the position of a very good journalist called Jay Rosen, who doesn’t necessarily want reporters not to attend the White House briefings, in fact, he has a better idea which, fair play to him, he first put forward at the start of 2017 — send the interns.

“Put your most junior people in the White House briefing rooms,” he advises. “Recognise that the real story is elsewhere, and most likely hidden.”

That’s the one.